


garden on your skin

by Ffwydriad



Series: future tense [4]
Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Background Beauregard/Reanminere, Character Study, F/F, Fluff, Magical Tattoos, Post-Canon, i should be doing nano but instead i wrote this
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-09
Updated: 2019-11-09
Packaged: 2021-01-25 20:54:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 670
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21362542
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ffwydriad/pseuds/Ffwydriad
Summary: beau, jester, and tattoos.((another futurefic. standalone, but closely tied in with 'home'))
Relationships: Jester Lavorre/Beauregard Lionett
Series: future tense [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1466338
Comments: 2
Kudos: 58





	garden on your skin

Each time Jester comes to visit, Beau gets a new tattoo. 

She didn't used to like tattoos. Oh, she admired them, they were always badass and looked incredible, but it always felt like something that chained her down to who she was in the moment. She didn't like the idea that it would stay with her forever, but now, it's something of a comfort, and slowly but surely the ink is covering up all that remains of her bare skin. 

Jester's been tattooing her for a long time. The early ones are from before, when they still traveled together, done with more than a small amount of guidance. The early tattoos all have meaning, deep symbolism of what they faced and magic that runs through them. Broken chains that meander across her upper body, offering her speed. A bleeding heart on her chest offering her protection. Arcane words of power, reminders of the past. 

Now, though, Beau gets flowers, and Jester makes jokes about all the bouquets she's brought from across the planes, just for Beau. 

Some of them still have magic in them, and each of them still have meaning, but now the meaning is just a handful of stories that don't quite live up to the epic nature that once defined their lives. They're just flowers. 

Each time Jester arrives from wherever she's been wandering this time, Beau welcomes her with open arms, and sits down at the dining table or lays across the couch as Jester pulls out her web like machine and whatever ink she's managed to collect and adds another flower to the garden across her skin, sharing a million ridiculous new anecdotes about all she's seen as she works. 

Some of the flowers are things that you would never find in Exandria, things only found in the deepest parts of the Feywild or in the Upper Planes. Others are simple things, that she's seen since she was a child, and there's even more that fill the range between. They blend together seamlessly, the differences never clashing, even with all the different ink and the wide gaps of time between when they were drawn. 

She's not the best subject - she's gotten better at sitting still, sure, but she's prone to distracting Jester as she works, with stories of her own, with bad jokes and memories. Jester will fall upon the floor laughing, but she never once makes a mistake. She might let the artwork she leaves scattered across the realms be sloppy, but she won't do the same to Beau's back.

Beau wouldn't mind so much, if she did. It's not really so much about what they look like, as it is about sitting together like this, a sign that they spent time together, a memory embedded in ink upon her skin. 

She used to hate flowers - well, she hated what they represented. It's hard to say when they stopped being something she hated, started to be something that she had no problem covering her skin. There's so many things that could've pushed it cross that line, the flowers that crawled up Molly's arms, the ones Yasha collected, the ones that Reani wove into crowns and placed upon her head, or all the ones that Nott and Jester had given her throughout the years. 

It doesn't matter, really. She likes them, now. Flowers overlapped with broken chains and bleeding hearts and arcane texts and all seeing eyes. A field of shifting color and peace that grows over but doesn't try to cover that which lies beneath it. It feels like peace. 

Jester always leaves, of course. Sometimes she stays for a long time, weeks and even months, but she always leaves. She's made of wanderlust and journey, can't be held back from dancing across the planes with a wide grin across her face, and Beau would never want her to stop. 

After all, she'll come back again, with new inks and new stories and new flowers to plant inside the garden scrawled across Beau's skin. 

**Author's Note:**

> ~i just want beau to be happy~
> 
> i really hope that post-canon jester being a planehopping avatar of chaos never gets jossed. out of all the future headcanons i've written up, it's by far my favorite. 
> 
> eventually, i'm going to end up drawing this beau design. maybe even draw up a few scenes from home. but ehhhhhh that's a lot of work. who knows.
> 
> i'm @malaismere on tumblr. feel free to come talk w/ me about crit role headcanons or literally whatever.


End file.
